“The city is strangely silent—after all the bombing and shelling. Three dangers are past—that of looting [Chinese] soldiers, bombing from aeroplanes and shelling from big guns, but the fourth is still before us—our fate at the hands of a victorious army. People are very anxious tonight and do not know what to expect . . […]
Career
Women Have a History
“History is no longer just a chronicle of kings and statesmen, of people who wielded power, but of ordinary women and men engaged in manifold tasks. Women’s history is an assertion that women have a history.” ~Aparna Basu, Professor of History at the University of Delhi, India And what a history it is! From warriors like Boudica, Zenobia, […]
I’m Not Going to Preach About Josh Duggar
I am not going to preach today about Josh Duggar and the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We’re all too addicted to these stories, of how the famous rise and fall. We have too much invested, in their fame in the first place, and then the […]
Hope is Too Heavy Sometimes
At 26 I was miraculously healed, but at 13 I started asking for healing. Sometimes people wonder why more people aren’t experiencing miracles, and I wonder sometimes if it is because we don’t understand how expensive hope is. I spent most of my teen years believing I would be healed. I went to every healing […]
I’ve Misused My Vulnerability in Leadership: I Want to Be Liked
I’m not going to be as liked. But I sense that I’m more often going to appeal to God’s Spirit for telling me “well done.”
Finding Contentment in the Uncomfortable
I’ve been asking myself what contentment is lately. This question tends to come when I’m elbows-deep in dish water or staring at my overflowing laundry basket. Sometimes it pops up when my doctor calls with bad news. While I lived overseas, I had such a deep ache for stability and rootedness. I moved abroad when […]
Turning Compassion Inward
Amy sat with me on my screened porch at the lake, listening the way only a woman who has spent thirty years as a cloistered nun in a monastery, then three more years training to be a therapist, can listen. “You have compassion fatigue,” she said. “What?” I asked. “There’s an actual name for this? […]
A Mudroom Exclusive: An Interview with Shannan Martin
Hi guys, Ashley Hales here. At The Mudroom, we love to let you know you’re not alone. We can sit in The Mudroom together, drop off all of our stuff, and know that we have a tribe who listens, understands, and can help hold all the crazy. And we’re privileged to do that even virtually, […]
No Small Thing
He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not. Small moments of being young flashed before my mind. I remembered my friends picking apart flowers in the hot Florida sun to determine the affection of their crush of the week. I was never a ‘boy crazy’ […]
When Life as You Know It Is Dying
I seem to be living the tail end of a dying life. According to the statistics, I am not the only one. I am not the only teacher who woke up one day and realized she could not possibly continue at the speed of the classroom with the course set to testing. It was killing […]
Reflections on the Festival of Faith & Writing
The Festival of Faith and Writing in April was extra special for us. Most of us were meeting each other for the first time, after a year of building The Mudroom. In that time some of us had experienced deep depression, overwhelming disappointment, loss of loved ones, career setbacks, parenting and marriage stressors. We walked through it […]
The Curious Blessing of Rejection
Ten years ago, in 2006, I was rejected by a publisher. It went like this: after four years of student ministry and thinking about a post-modern culture, I had an idea for a book that explored characteristics of student ministry in the context of postmodernism – a sort of analytical, practical, theological-yet-readable sort of book. […]
Lifting the Veil
Our collective imagination is haunted by a certain image of the artist: a solitary bard, brooding alone, awaiting a burst of inspiration from a mysterious and magical muse. We see the person with the creative spirit as one who stands above and apart from the common lot, a secular priest who mediates between regular folks […]
Can We Survive on Inspiration?
I was more surprised than anyone when I signed up to run a half marathon two years ago. I’d never been much of a runner and had not participated in an organized race before; starting with 13.1 miles was, I admit, a little bold. I had some friends running with me and was looking for […]
The Everyday Words
I’m not sure why it came as such a surprise to me. A few months into a period of not-writing-much-at-all, I discovered that I was suffering from what some might call writer’s block. I had gone from blogging a few times a week to a few times a month, if that. Pitches and proposals had […]
How I Found Creativity After Being the DIY Queen
Creativity is a privilege. I wouldn’t have made such a statement five, ten years ago. I probably would have said that creativity is something we’re born with, that not being able to pass by your local Hobby Lobby without going inside may be a good indication that the Creativity Fairy has taken up residence in […]
Waiting for Twilight
The summer before I got married Dave went away to teach at a program for brilliant young writers and I stayed in Pittsburgh, trying to finish my master’s thesis, which I hadn’t started. One night, there was a terrible thunderstorm, and my friend Rachael came over to keep me company. We drank mint juleps and […]
Writing for Ducks
Today, we watched Frozen twice. Once because they were tired and once because I was tired. Usually we do puzzles and read and bake and play in the little pink kitchen that’s always askew in the corner. But today we snuggled, we danced, we sang. We also ate Kit-Kats and had chocolate smeared on our […]